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Kubrick’s “The Shining” almost had a more WTF ending (12 Photos)

If there’s one film I’ll watch over and over again, it’s going to be The Shining. I’m a huge Stephen King fan and the book is a guilty pleasure of staying up all night to read it and be absolutely wrecked the next morning. The same goes for the film. I also rank Stanley Kubrick extremely high in my pantheon of awesome directors and this film is just far to unsettling to ignore, even after all these years.

Plenty of people in the years since it premiered have spent time analyzing the intricacies of the film, and what Kubrick was trying to say with it. Some theories (outlined in the awesome documentary Room 237) talk about his involvement with the moon landings, or the film serving as an apology for the genocide of Native Americans, but what really sticks out in the collective consciousness of the viewer is the ending.

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If you don’t recall, this is the very last scene of the film. After we’ve seen Jack frozen to death and Wendy and Danny get away, we’re left with this photo of Jack, at the Overlook, from 1921, leaving the viewer wondering what the hell was going on.

As it turns out, the ending could have been way more messed up and confusing, and the original parts of the film that were cut, were lost to history, until recently.

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One of the key reasons why The Shining is still a popular film is the fact that the movie’s internal logic doesn’t make sense, and that’s all due to Kubrick. When he set out to direct a ghost story, he wanted to make it eerie, but not fantastical, nor did he want it to end with a bang, as that was too cliche. He dropped several of King’s narrative elements (exploding boiler, moving hedge animals) and rewrote the ending.

But how he made the film fucked up was with geography and architecture. When you see the Overlook from the outside, compared to the inside, the layout doesn’t match. According to one of the producers Jan Harlan, the explanation was this:

“Very often crew members asked [Kubrick], “Can you explain that to me?” And he said, “I never explain anything, I don’t understand it myself. It’s a ghost film!” You can’t imagine how much fuss was made over the big golden ballroom and the big lobby and huge windows that could never have fit into the hotel [based on the] establishing shot from outside. Any child can see that. And Stanley’s explanation was, “It’s a ghost film! Forget it!”

But that wasn’t the only place where Kubrick wasn’t giving answers.

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Since he had thrown out a lot of the end elements from the novel, he was still revising the screenplay and the shooting script up until the very end, to the point that even in post-production, no one was sure how the film was going to end. Hell, the film was going to be released and Kubrick and his team hadn’t really settled on an ending. In fact, during its initial screening, there was an additional scene that was inserted between seeing Jack frozen in the maze and the portrait at the end, and it was only known to the director, the producers and the few people that saw the opening screenings. After the US premiere, he had the scene cut and all versions of the negative destroyed. Even the script pages were supposedly burned.

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Somehow a Kubrick fan Tumblr by the name The Overlook Hotel found and published copies of the missing scenes and they’re confusing as fuck.

They have to do with Stuart Ullman, the hotel’s manager who visits Wendy and Danny in the hospital.

But this is where it gets a little eerie. When we see Wendy and Danny leave in the SnoCat, the hotel’s a mess – there’s broken doors, blood everywhere and Hallorann’s body in the foyer, not to mention a Jack-sicle in the hedge maze. Except nothing is found.

This ball that Jack was throwing against the wall during a case of writer’s block.

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And the same ball that came rolling out of nowhere to entice Danny to go into Room 237. Where did it come from? What did it mean? Why did Ullman bring it to Danny of all people? According to Harlan:

“The tennis ball is the same thing as the photograph — it’s unexplainable. It makes Ullman now another ghost element. Was he the ghost from the very beginning? The film is complex enough because nothing is explained. That non-explaining is what was bad for the film initially. It was not a huge success. Now everybody thinks it’s the best horror film ever or whatever. But when it came out the audience expected a horror film with a resolution, with an explanation. Who is the baddie? What was going on? And they were disappointed — many of them, anyway. The fact they were left puzzled was exactly what Stanley Kubrick wanted. And when the film [screened for critics] and wasn’t well received, Warners quite rightly suggested, “It’s enough, just take [the hospital scene] out.” So Stanley did it. He’s not stubborn, especially since this is a film mainly to entertain people. But Stanley was actually very sad that he misread the audience, that he trusted the audience to live with puzzles and no answers, and that they didn’t like it.”

So the fact that perhaps Ullman was a ghostly manifestation of the Overlook, actually leaving the hotel to serve as a ‘clean up crew’ and make sure that the hotel’s continual existence was assured, was just one too many ‘spooky’ elements for the audience. Either way, it does make the ending even more supernatural than it already was.

Not to mention this epilogue, hinting that the Hotel had seen some horrible things and will continue to see more of them, and continue to thrive. Probably left too many questions, and since Kubrick was a ‘live in the present’ kind of director, he never answered questions or submitted to any analysis of this film. Once it was done and screened, that was his final say on the subject.

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